I am an English Language Fellow providing teacher training workshops and feedback to teachers in Kyrgyzstan so as to make their classes more interactive and fun.
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Tuesday, October 30, 2012

October 29, 2012

I overslept once again and having promised the staff at
Lingua that I’d be bringing rice and beans this morning prompted me to notify
Gulnara I’d be coming in an hour later since I didn’t have a meeting or
observation scheduled anyway.

The coconut milk I had purchased turned out to be more
coconut water as it had no taste of coconut whatsoever. I cooked only two cups
of rice in the little saucepan and even at the lowest setting the stove offered
it burned the bottom layer rather quick. There was no aroma of cooked white
rice in the flat as I so much like to smell. I packed as much as I could in one
of the two plastic containers I have and took them to the school. It was warmer
outside than the weather forecast indicated and it was a delight to walk to the
office admiring the continuing changes of the leaves.

There wasn’t much time for me to print and laminate the
cards that day’s presentation after Anna came to ask me if I had had a chance
to work on the CATEC documents. I admitted I had had no time to do so and would
do it that evening once I was back home. The two of us had received a memo from
Natasha subsequent to our meeting asking for other details to be included on
the document.

She gave me directions to her university, the Russian Slavic
University of Kyrgyzstan, where I’ll start to do my workshops next Tuesday. It
was relief to hear teachers only had an hour and a half to devote to them. I
offered to give the teachers a survey form to determine what topics they wanted
to see covered after the initial workshop.

I took my lamination to my guy and waited for the three pages
to be done while standing in the crowded passageway. On the way to the bus stop
to get to KNU, I noticed there was an entire line of stores I hadn’t seen or
paid attention to before. These tiny cubicles, so to speak, all sold gold and
silver jewelry and had plenty of women mesmerized at the offerings on the
windows. Some of the jewelry appeared to be Kyrgyz, but other resembled Tibetan
or Indian pieces.

The usual classroom we had occupied for the last three weeks
was being remodeled, with money provided by the Chinese embassy, to become a
computer lab, so we were dumped into a tiny room with some wired-together
benches and a red blackboard. The sixteen teachers that showed up then were
barely able to fit into the four benches available.

To my dismay, I learned that the presentation I had slavishly
worked on was completely off-target since it was aimed to address issues
related to large classes with students at varying levels. The teachers informed
me that their classes were small by comparison, fifteen students maximum, but
there was no entrance exam or placement test as the students were assigned to classes
simply based on their status as freshmen, sophomore and the like.

As a result, some of the students were fairly fluent while
others could barely read or write in English much less speak at all. The
teachers have no choice as to who gets into their classes and must work with
everyone at whatever level they might be. So as not to waste their time, but
still interested in showing them some strategies to deal with low level and
advanced level students in the same classroom, I moved on to the portion of the
presentation that provided specific ideas on that topic. They were interested
in the concept of cooperative teaching and learning, but I told them that was a
completely different presentation.

At 4:10pm, students were knocking on the door letting us
know another class was due to begin there soon. We packed up our stuff and I
reminded them that certificates should be ready by Thursday and had everyone
check their hours and spelling of their names before five of us repaired to a café,
for what I thought would be a cup of coffee, but turned out to be a full
dinner. Bazilat had chosen a nearby restaurant owned by people from her region,
Talas, so I could try the local cuisine. We sat at a tapchon and she did the
ordering.

The teachers had asked for contributions to buy me a small present
and they gave me a set of earrings that looked exactly like the ones I had been
peering at that afternoon at the jewelry row made of silver with a small green
stone in the center.

We had two somewhat spicy salads, one of them with sesame
seeds, and one with the usual large amount of mayonnaise. The main entrée consisted
of the local dish, beshbarmak, which turned out to be a pile of overly cooked
noodles with pieces of boiled horse meat in around the noodles. I didn’t care
for the flavor of the meat and the noodles’ texture was a turn off. I ate a
little bit of it by mixing it with the sauce from the salad and had to take the
rest home claiming to be already full. Gulnara, from Forum, came in toward the
end of the meal and we were able to talk in a relaxed manner for the first
time.

One teacher commented that her daughter’s child care bill
almost equaled her monthly salary at 4,500 soms or $97.00 and that her husband
wanted for her to quit her job and stay home to take care of their child. She had
been successful in convincing him that her job was important and made her feel
like she was making a contribution to society.

Another confided that she had been married for only a year
and her husband had been away for almost as long living in the UK because there
are no jobs here for him. She said he worked in the construction field and
acknowledged he sent her no money at all. Two of them concurred it was easy for
them to get visas to Europe, but not to the United States, and their problem in
leaving the country was not having the money to do so.

Two of the teachers walked me home while commenting on the deplorable
state of the streets, the lack of sidewalks, the irresponsible manner of most
drivers all the while feeling nostalgic for the Soviet years when they both
felt the city was a safer place to live.